How SEO Can Boost Your Business: An Introduction
What Is SEO?
Google’s search engine aims to “deliver the most relevant and reliable information available”, making it easy for people to find what they are looking for online.
SEO, Search Engine Optimisation, involves making targeted changes to your website to get it to appear at the top of Google’s search results when someone asks a relevant question.
So, for example, if a person searched for “clutch repair in Wakefield” and you had a garage based in Wakefield, you’d want your website to appear as close to the top of the search results as possible. The higher it appears on the page, the more likely the person is to click on it.
The three pillars of SEO
The three pillars of SEO are:
Technical - your website should work and be easy to use.
Content - your website should have relevant, helpful content.
Links - high-quality links from other sites tell Google that your website can be trusted.
A car is a fantastic analogy for these pillars.
Every car needs a chassis. Without it, what would hold the vehicle together? This is our technical aspect of SEO: the website and how it’s built.
Once we have a solid chassis, we need seats, a steering wheel and bodywork. These are the things that you look at and interact with. They might be why you’ve bought that car in the first place. Without these, we’d be riding around the streets on a board with four wheels. This is our content.
How to improve SEO
John Mueller, a Google Search Advocate who helps us understand what Google is trying to achieve, says that creating unique, compelling, high-quality content is the key to improving SEO.
Content is King
Google loves unique research and content that it has never seen before, and content users will enjoy reading. If you’re an established brand with data no one else can access, this research will be much easier for you to pull together.
However, if you’re willing to source the data through questionnaires, surveys, interviews, etc, you can create a fantastic resource that your audience (and Google) will love. And if your content can solve a pain point or lead the user to help diagnose an issue that you can fix for them, you’re likely to win a loyal customer who will return for any future work.
In the automotive space, drivers generally want to learn about what might be wrong with their car, how it can be fixed, and how much it might cost.
Once you’ve created a fantastic piece of content, keep it up to date. This could involve updating prices or expanding on the topic with new learnings.
Find your community
Good content is also link-worthy content. Share it with your community wherever they may be, whether that be forums, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc. People interested in your expertise will see your content and potentially reshare it with their networks. It can be a fantastic way to gain links from reputable sites genuinely interested in your creation.
Depending on the type of content you’ve made, you could even send it to relevant local journalists to see if they would like to cover it on their respective sites/publications. While this falls under digital PR rather than SEO, it can be a fantastic source of authoritative backlinks.
If you have any questions on anything in this guide or would like any help ranking your site in Google Search, please get in touch via the following email, and we’ll help wherever we can: seo@whocanfixmycar.comRelated Articles
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